Posted by Jerry on January 31st, 2006 — Posted in Journal, Woodwork
My latest Amazon.com purchase arrived today! The book: Wood: The world of woodwork and wood carving
by Bryan Sentance. I first saw it in a bookshop just after Christmas and nearly bought it on the spot – the graphics are excellent and the scope is very wide.
The book is organised into 7 chapters covering: Raw materials (types of wood); Carving and shaping wood (lots of illustrated examples of different styles and techniques); Joinery (fixings, types of joint and corners); Decorating and finishing (veneers and surface treatments); Wood at work (from pots and bowls to chairs, implements, technology, wood and textiles and transport); Heart and soul (printing, toys, rituals, and masks); and Tools (organised by family – measuring, making holes, smoothing, holding and so on).
This is a richly illustrated compendium of brief articles showing a range of treatments, techniques and tools in a social context with some historical examples. The great thing is you can pick the book up, read a quick section over a cuppa and then go on with something else – and wherever you dip there is another fascinating snippet.
To celebrate this new arrival, I have signed up as an Amazon Affiliate and I’ve finally got around to putting my own book in the sidebar, as well as my current reading – you will see the latter change as my reading selections change 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on January 14th, 2006 — Posted in Woodwork
I love recycling timber – especially from old brick pallets. Some time ago I built a garden table from pallet timber – you can see the step by step instructions here.
I had finished it in oil as a quick’n’dirty finish as I was in a rush to take it to a folk festival the next day. Months later and several folk festivals later the surface was marked with cooking grease, soil, coffee and soot from cooking pans at the campsite. The poor old thing was beginning to resemble the original timber!
Time to re-finish it – this time with a durable polyurethane varnish. The thing about varnishes is that I’m basically lousy with a brush – everything I paint leaves brush marks, and that is why I mostly use a simple wipe on and sand-in oil finish.
That’s when I heard about a gel varnish (Cabot’s Gel Clear) – it doesn’t work like most finishes – you don’t stir it or shake it or thin it – you just brush it on and each coat is like 10 coats of normal varnish. That sounded like my kind of technology.
So after a thorough sanding to remove the grime, and de-nib the wood grain, I brushed it on and waited for it to set. Well, the grain came up and the brush marks stood out like Saharan sand dunes – I had over-brushed it. So it was back to the internet for answers. That’s when I saw some readers wood projects, and a few talked about the finish as gel varnish wiped on with a rag – just like French polish!
More sanding to remove my disastrous finish, and then a finish sanding to 1500 grit and a wipe with talc to fill the grain, followed by three light coats of gel varnish wiped on with a soft rag – allowing 6 hours in between coats, and given a light sanding between coats with 1200 grit sanding discs on my Triton orbital sanding attachment.
The final coat I applied with a rag and then wiped it over with a fresh rag dipped in turps to ensure a really even coat.
Now this is looking more like it – the white stripe is the reflection of the flouro light – and no brush marks!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on January 9th, 2006 — Posted in Technology, Woodwork
Happy new year everyone! Time to review one of my new toys – the GMC 1HP dust collector.
I was due to run some fence palings through the Ryobi 13″ thicknesser for a friend who makes picture frames, so it seemed a good test for the GMC dust extractor. My earlier attempts to keep the dust and chips from the thicknesser from forming a large pile of chips on the floor and a thick cloud of dust in the workshop had only met with marginal success.
My Ryobi thicknesser did not come with a dust extraction port (the new ones do from last year). So I had fitted the dust port from a Sherwood 13″ thicknesser – it fits perfectly (purchased from Timbecon as an accesssory at last year’s Working with Wood show in Canberra). And I had cobbled up an adapter to the shop-vac but that had been only partially successful – when the bin filled all dust extraction ceased!
Enter the GMC dust extractor. It came in large box with some simple assembly to do – fit the handle, the casters – which do help with moving the 20kg machine around – and the collector hose and bag.
First the good points – set up was easy with a clear well illustrated instruction booklet. The construction seems pretty solid – although the 4″ (100mm) hose seems very thin walled and looks as though it would hole easily on a snag. The induction motor is very quiet compared with the shop vac, and there was little discernable difference in sound whether the motor was under load or not – ie whether or not the hose was constricted. The bag is a good size for hobby use and is made from a tight weave polyester, and is rated for 30 micron particle size.
What this means is that it will do a great job of clearing the chips and coarse sawdust, but the fine stuff that damages your lungs will go straight through the bag – you can see it as a fine cloud when you start the machine up – so keep the mask on for personal protection. GMC would do well to offer a 4 micron felt bag as an accessory – but I suspect the carbatec or sherwood ones would fit perfectly – and will be on my shopping list.
The hose was a good fit on the 100mm extracator port on the thicknesser and the machine did a very respectable effort at capturing probably 98 percent of the dust and chips – and it did so for a good hour without getting warm.
Summary – this is a good hobby machine for those with limited workshop space who need a solid, but light and portable dust extractor for occasional hobby use. It does not have the capacity or airflow (measured in cubic feet per minute – cfm) of a 2-3 horspower machine, but it represents a good effort for GMC’s entry into dust extractors. I would definitely fit a carba-tec or sherwood felt bag to capture the finer dust, and contrary to the brochure I would not be using this for more than one machine at a time. But at half the price of its competitors (under AUS$100), this is a great accessory for any hobbyist woodworker.
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Posted by Jerry on September 11th, 2005 — Posted in Journal, Woodwork
After a year or so the portable tightrope is still going strong – and is still strong enough for my weight. But my daughter had managed to find a source of 10mm wire rope at Revolve – the local tip shop – so it was time to revisit the tightrope.
A close inspection revealed that extensive use had taken some toll on the tightrope structure – the turnbuckle screws were beginning to bend (due to a temporary quick and dirty attachment of 12mm wire rope) and one of the pop rivets had lost its head on one of the support legs. Also the bolt leading to one of the turnbuckles had a stretched thread due to over-tightening at some point.
So it was off to Bunnings for new turnbuckles, wire rope thimbles and 10mm wire rope clamps. And why not pick up a couple of brackets too for good measure.
I drilled and replaced the damaged rivet, then replaced the turnbuckles and fitted the new 10mm wire rope. My daughter had noted that professional portable rigs had small circular platforms at either end – more stable than garden chairs, so this seemed like a good opportunity to upgrade the rig accordingly.
I had some 300mm pine boards lying around, so I scribed a circle and cut the discs out on the bandsaw (just a cheapo hobby GMC one, but it’s enough for small job like this one). Then a quick sanding to remove the high spots and a quick spray with some undercoat and then a couple of layers of enamel to make it weatherproof. And here is the result – a definite improvement on the original design!
Portable Tightrope
And yes the whole structure fits in the van at just a shade over two metres in length 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on September 5th, 2005 — Posted in Journal, Woodwork
What better way to spend Father’s Day in Canberra than to spend it at the Working With Wood Show at Exhibition Park in Canberra. These come around every year at about the same time, and showcase the latest and greatest tools for the amateur or semi-professional woodworker. The show prices are great (more on that later) but the real treat is seeing the demonstrations of woodworking techniques from turning, ornamental turning, box making, applying finishes, and heaps more.
Australian Woodworker magazine recently did a feature on Australian inventors over the past 20 years – and most of them turn up every year at the Working With Wood show – so you get to meet some great people sharing a passion for converting trees into heirlooms.
Among the highlights were seeing Roger Gifkin demonstrating his dovetailing jig; the guy who invented the WASP sander – which attaches to the workshop drill and has to be the fastest way to change sanding belts I’ve ever seen; and Stan ‘The Man’ Ceglinski of Mullumbimby Woodworks making bush furniture, and running his amazing Great Saw Race using a couple of 100 year old two-person saws. Then there was the Ozzie Jigs bloke – whose invention is featured in the Australian Design Museum – and the AngleMagthe list goes on.
There were demos of the Lucas sawmill, and a range of Westford chainsaw mills from Western Australia, such as this one:
Westford Chainsaw mill
And there were small slabbing attachments for smaller chainsaws (maybe next year!).
Of course if you set someone like me loose in a giant toyshop like the Working With Wood show you can expect that one or two things might wind up in my car at the end of the day. I even considered taking the motorbike on the basis that I would only get a few small items. Well, I carefully locked my best intentions away and armed myself with the plastic card and dutifully checked out the show specials.
First stop was CarbaTec – they have a shop in Fyshwick here in Canberra, but they were offering special show prices and then 10 percent off that – so I was soon carrying around a lovely Hamlet roughing gouge for the lathe. I ws sorely tempted by Robert Sorby goose necked turning chisels, but resisted manfully. Then it was off to Timbecon – the mob from Western Australia. I decided to leave the 1HP grinder… in the parcel pickup for later – this was accompanied by a great special combining an aluminium oxide wheel and a sharpening rest of really decent proportions:
The grinder, the toolrest and the roughing gouge
Then a quick glance at the triton offerings – I love the way their stuff is able to be retrofitted to even the earliest versions of the sawbench. I asked, in an offhand casual way, the price of the saw height winder kit – and the saw chassis upgrade so it would fit my old MK3 saw bench. What I saved there was more than the entrance fee to the show and those items were quickly added to the parcel pickup.
Triton height winder kit
And here it is mounted on the trusty Mk3.
I was getting the hang of this now, but needed just a little more practice – and that’s when I saw the router base and guide bushing kit. You see it’s like this. Last year I picked up a dovetail jig and a couple of dovetail router bits with attached bearings. But the bearings kept breaking, leaving me with a couple of perfectly good router bits, but no way to use them in the dovetail jig. With the new router base and guide bushes I can run the dovetail bits through the jig without fear of snagging the sides!
Router guide bushing kit
So that was the Working With Wood show for 2005 – and yes I had a great Fathers Day 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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